


All Things Change

by satincolt



Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Behind the Scenes, Gen, Headcanon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-25
Updated: 2016-05-25
Packaged: 2018-06-10 14:37:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,261
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6961021
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/satincolt/pseuds/satincolt
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Things don’t stay the same forever, even in the Underground.  Change is here, it's a quiet human blundering through Snowdin on Alphys' computer screen, and Mettaton can't get dressed fast enough to fashionably greet it.</p>
<p>My headcanons on Mettaton's relationship to his robotic body, Mettaton and Alphys' relationship, and their reaction to Frisk arriving in the Underground.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All Things Change

Mettaton hovers over Alphys’ shoulder as she tinkers with his EX body. Its chestplate has been removed and the chassis opened to reveal the mechanical guts—all the flywheels and servos and gyroscopes and batteries—that make Mettaton’s body tick. If Mettaton had hands in his natural form, he’d point at things and ask what they did, but he has to instead vocally point.

“That shiny grey thing next to that black cord, what does that do?”

Alphys glances flatly over her shoulder at the ghost encroaching on her personal space.

“Which shiny grey thing? There’s a t-ton-on of them.” She guesses and points to a shiny grey thing next to a black cord with her wrench.

“No no no no no, the other one. To the right, Alphys, _really_ , how do you not know which one I’m talking about?”

Alphys points slightly more to the right.

“Yes! That one,” Mettaton says, and starts to drift around to the other side of the table, but Alphys sticks her arm out in front of him.

“Not s-so fast. Remember what happened l-last time? You stay beh-hi-hind me,” she says firmly, flipping her wrench in her fingers so that it pokes into Mettaton’s incorporeal belly.

“ _Rude_ ,” he mutters, but the sassy effect it would normally have with his brassy robotic voice is lost in the breathiness of his faint ghostly voice. He retreats slightly to float just over Alphys’ other shoulder and continues to critically surveil everything. “Is this really necessary, all this high-maintenance technology? It would be just as easy for me to possess if the shell was empty.”

Alphys rounds on him and flings her wrench; he rockets backwards halfway into the wall to avoid the thrown tool.

“Don’t s-say that! You _n-nee-need_ this body like th-this! It w-wouldn’t w-work, you couldn’t _m-mo-o-ve_ if it wasn’t roboti-ic!” Alphys shouts, a desperate edge in her voice. “D-don’t you tell anyb-body that you _possess_ th-this body!”

Mettaton inches out of the wall, uncertainty etched on his spare features. “Look, Alphys, darling, I appreciate you making this body for me. Being corporeal has always been my biggest dream, and you’re the only person who has been able to make a body good enough for me. …but I hate having to hide that I am _me_ , that I have to pretend you made _me_. Not just my body, but _me_.” He edges closer to Alphys, who is staring intently at the EX body’s blank, incomplete face to avoid looking at Mettaton. “Can’t you tell Asgore that you made an _astounding_ feat of engineering—show him the body runs on its own—”

“I can’t!” Alphys shouts, teary-eyed, still looking at the EX body. “He’ll know I’m-m a _l-li-liar-r_ and he’ll make so-someone else the Roy-oyal S-s-scientist! If I hadn’t s-said I made you after G-Gaster die-ied, he w-would have made _S-San-ans_ the R-royal Scienti-ist,” she hiccups, wiping away her tears on the sleeve of her lab coat.

“Alphys, I’m sure he won’t…” Mettaton drifts closer to her, uncertain. “And if you don’t now, then when will you? I’m not going to pretend to be your … _child_ forever. We said we were going to help each other and we are. We’ve gotten each other to where we are now. Things don’t stay the same forever, even in the Underground, and at some point we have to tell people.”

Alphys sighs, bows her head to rest on her arms crossed on the table in front of her. She’s quiet for a very long time. Mettaton moves around to the other side of the table to try to see her face.

“You’re supposed to s-stay behind me w-when your body’s on the table,” she says softly, looking up at him. Mettaton gives her a small smile. The skin between her eyes and her scales is bloodshot and her nose is still runny, but Mettaton can tell Alphys is pulling herself together.

“Is it almost ready for a test run?” he asks as he breezes around the table again. Alphys wipes her nose on her sleeve.

“C-can you get that wrench f-for me?” she points to the flung wrench in the corner of the workshop by the computers. Mettaton nods—or what passes for a nod with a ghost—and retrieves the wrench by pushing it along the floor.

“Being corporeal is so convenient,” he mutters, barely louder than the sound of the wrench scraping across the scuffed tiles of the lab floor.

“Th-thanks,” Alphys says as she bends to pick the wrench up. “If you give me a-a week, then I can have this wh-hole body calibrated and the face finished, and you can sh-show it off.”

Mettaton grins at her and peers down at the EX body. It’s going to be _far_ more glamorous than his normal body. Alphys has truly put an extraordinary amount of effort into sculpting the face, and Mettaton could not be happier. The thought of being handsome and _humanoid_ makes him shiver with anticipation. He nearly tumbles out of the air as his thoughts are interrupted by a strangled squawk from Alphys.

“M-mettaton! _Look_!”

He glides over to the computer terminal. Hands planted on the mousepad, Alphys stares open-mouthed up at the screen as it displays the image of a—a _human. In Snowdin._

“It’s a human…!” Mettaton gasps, eyes going huge. “ _Alphys!_ ” he shouts, bobbing wildly in the air. “Put my body back together! I have to go meet them!”

Alphys nods and rushes back over to the table. She almost has trouble closing the body up, her hands are trembling with excitement like Mettaton’s entire ghostly body, and she strains to roll the body over onto its face. Mettaton winces at that.

“This switch here,” she pants, “turns from o-one body to the other.” She flips it, and the air fills with acrid steam and mechanical whines and grinding and buzzes, but when it clears, Mettaton’s normal form is there on the table. Alphys powers it up, the lights on its screen blazing to life, and tips it off the table. It wobbles as the gyroscopes stabilize it in the upright position. Wiping her sweaty face, Alphys gestures grandly to it.

Mettaton soars forward and practically slams his body, sending its servos wild as it tries to keep from tipping over as Mettaton squeezes into it, sinking down through the cracks until he’s completely inside.

“Alphys, how do I look?” his voice is once again _loud_ and brash.

“J-just great, but turn the v-volume down a little.” Mettaton gives her the thumbs up and rolls over to the nearest large, panel window overlooking the Core, checking his reflection. The familiar soft, high-pitched whine of servos accompany his every move. He stares at himself for a couple beats, then pivots.

“Where is the human? When will they get here? I need to get ready,” he races over to the computer screen again. “Still in Snowdin? My, they’re slow. Ah, well, more time for me to make a grand debut!”

With that, Mettaton peels out of the lab at top speed, talking to himself. Alphys hears him slip and fall as he tries to corner too sharply far down the hall and she snorts. An indignant “hey!” echoes through the room, but he’s already long gone.

Alphys collects her tools off her workbench and puts them away, then grabs a cup of instant noodles, microwaves it, and settles down in front of the screen to watch the human blunder through Snowdin.

Things don’t stay the same forever. Change is here in the Underground.

**Author's Note:**

> I have always wondered about the complexities of being a ghost in a robotic body, and how that would work. If the Mad Dummy is just that--a dummy possessed by a mad ghost, why would Mettaton's body need to be robotic? Because Alphys claimed she manufactured a SOUL and a body, so it would have to be robotic, but in reality, she just manufactured a body for the ghost that became Mettaton. I imagine that's a very complicated relationship, as both have to keep the secret that Mettaton is a ghost and pretend that Alphys made him, and there's bound to be some tension there.
> 
> I also wanted to deal in part with the trope/dominant narrative in Mettaton fic that involves Alphys doing "maintenance" on his body while it's turned on and he's in it, which generally ends up being very medical, voyeuristic, and sexual (and I'm not about any of that). So I figured, when you fix a computer, you turn it all the way off. So if Mettaton left his body and powered it all the way down in doing so, it would be far easier for Alphys to work on and also wouldn't be so creepy-medical.
> 
> The last thing I wanted to do with this headcanon snippet was explore why Mettaton's EX body is incomplete. If it was still under construction when Frisk arrived, then that would explain why he debuts it during the fight, instead of any time before that. I also liked playing around with the idea of the Underground life before Frisk came and shook everything up.


End file.
